| |SEPTEMBER 20219The retail industry contributes 10 percent of India's GDP and is one of the top 5 retail markets in the world powered by our 1.3 billion populationneed to submit receipts to their fi-nance teams· Digital Receipts also save space in wallets/bags· And solving the most crucial prob-lem of fading away of important thermal prints on paper receipts that can frustrate even the most astute expense managersHowever, what needs to be really appreciated about digital receipts is that this seemingly simple change in format has suddenly opened a whole new world of opportunities for brands and retailers. This is almost as path-breaking in retail as was the mass adoption of debit and credit cards.Digital receipts are helping retail brands to maximise their connection with customers and changing the rela-tionship from being transactional and impulse-driven to one of engagement and trust. This is especially true for retailers who realise that a digital re-ceipt is much more than a digital copy of the old paper receipt. The digital receipt while frozen in time is actually a dynamic and live handshake with the customer for life. When such a handshake is established, it gives the retailer an opportunity to quickly increase their market share and build customer lifetime value. The digital receipt as a dynamic and live handshake initiative by trans-formative retailers conveys multiple actions through one vehicle. Like, in addition to the transaction infor-mation, the receipt can also carry future offers, discounts and other integrated possibilities that ease cus-tomer effort and increase retailer affinity including:· Time-based trigger of discount offers from the central server lev-eraging the customers' contact information and purchase history· Enabling customers to eas-ily share the receipt with fam-ily and friends with a single click integration via messaging apps· Increasing customer spend with reminders for product replace-ment, servicing and privileged discounts· Precipitating renewed/more fre-quent purchase window with new product launch information· Empowering the customers by sharing complementary uses, in-vites, freebies· Promoting new launches with a quick purchase windowTo add to this, the digital receipt system also captures transactional data which allows retailers to gain access to customer insights including their individual needs which leads to higher customer satisfaction, greater loyalty and more referrals.Artificial Intelligence is also play-ing a large role in retail by enabling brands to have smarter conversations with faster customer support. The AI engine combined with digital receipts enables learning across different cus-tomer engagements to further enrich the conversation and improve custom-er relationships by taking feedback di-rectly via digital receipt.According to McKinsey "It (om-nichannel) can improve customer satisfaction by providing a more per-sonalized experience and even create `moments of delight' for the customer during interactions that truly matter to them." Not only this but digital receipts also help brands save money by shar-ing consolidated information about any particular transaction digitally and removing the need for paper and printing with thermal receipts. Digital receipts can also increase brand recall value with complete customization and branding options easily available.As the world awaits to unlock - it is getting clear that brands will have to adopt digital receipts in order to create a truly contactless shopping experience in the Omni channel re-tail world. Customers too are eager to adopt the latest in contactless shop-ping which works to their advantage and convenience.The innovations possible with digi-tal receipts are just getting started. As the offering matures, the cross-link-ages will become even more reward-ing and transformative for retailers. Some major brands even advocating for an even more seamless customer experience that integrates with mobile banking applications, which will en-able saving the receipts in customers' bank account records. The future will bring into play the network effect with customers, where the power of the net-work increases significantly with the addition of users. Combine this with the current mobile network of 400 million WhatsApp users as per Tech-crunch and 310 million Facebook users as per Statistica, and the opportunity for retailers becomes really huge. The retail industry contributes 10 percent of India's GDP and is one of the top five retail markets in the world powered by our 1.3 billion population. The impact of digital receipts driven retail revolution will definitely create winners ­ including both the consum-ers and the retailers.
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